Re:Why the Culture Wins: An Appreciation of Iain M. Banks (2...
by jbgt on Monday October 16, 2023 @11:52AM
(#37901625)
Actually, computers were banned because humans were enslaved to thinking machines for several millennia.
The butlerian jihad is when mankind rose up and physically destroyed every "thinking machine". Then they developed mentat schools to make human calculators / logicians.
Re:Why the Culture Wins: An Appreciation of Iain M. Banks (2...
by rsynnott on Monday October 16, 2023 @12:16PM
(#37902031)
> Actually, computers were banned because humans were enslaved to thinking machines for several millennia.
Only if you accept Brian Herbert's additions to the canon. Assuming that, like all right-thinking people, you treat those as apocryphal, it's left _very_ vague as it exactly what it was all about, and it's at least implied that it was not particularly rational.
You can find people today who'll tell you that humans are enslaved by computers because, I dunno, we use TikTok too much or something.
If you mean the Brian Herbert prequels, a lot of fans don't really consider those to be canonical. I don't remember much exploration of this in the later Frank Herbert books; if anything most of the restrictions are eventually abandoned.
> Computers are banned (for good reasons)
It's at least _hinted_ that this was more about a moral panic than anything else.
Dune's technology setup is contrived to produce a particular type of society; it's one of the most extreme examples of this approach. There's nothing wrong with this (and it's very common in sci-fi) but it is what it is.